We took turns playing with Samantha outside because you're supposed to be quiet and not touch anything inside of his studio. She can do both of those things but just not at the same time.
Next we walked into the city center, where we found an almost magical candy store, La Cure Gourmande.
We were lucky enough to stay with the parents of my friend Ezra, who moved to Austin from England four years ago. They are six years into restoring a house that was first built around 1550. The inside magnificently blends in modern designs.
They live outside of Pertuis, which is a small town outside of Aix-en-Provence, and there is no other house in sight, with the exception of the neighbor that shares one wall of their house. I think the two houses used to be one because the neighbor was actually born in the room where Samantha slept. He's lived in the house his whole life and never ventured farther than Marseilles, twenty miles to the south. It makes me happy that you can still find someone like this.
The girls' favorite attraction was their dog, Tuffy, and it didn't take us long to find out her unsanitized German name, Tuffschitt. Seeing the girls around the dog convinced us that we'll have to get one in the next couple of years. Maybe we'll give it a French name.
They also introduced us to some funky-looking local tomatoes. They have a thinner skin and taste better, too.
On Saturday we picked up lunch in Aix-en-Provence and headed down to the coast. We keep the windows down since the car doesn't have AC. The girls get a little hot sometimes, but it's not too bad yet.
In the masterpiece 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Robert Pirsig says that you can't really experience a place boxed up inside a car. That's just glorified TV. Whereas on a motorcycle, you're out in the open and able to take in everything. And there's nothing wrong with being hot and worn out and smelling like two hundred miles by the end of the day. Going on a road trip with the windows down captured some of this allure. We'll see if I still agree with him in June.
We drove through the Camargue to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where we found a small beach. The girls had lots of fun playing in the sand and running away from the waves.
We spent the night in Montpellier, and on the way out of town the next day, we stumbled onto a zoo. You can tell this is a French zoo because there's an old man wearing a beret.
Since it was early, the only other people at the park were joggers, and we had it mostly to ourselves. After going through the gates and seeing one peacock, we had to walk ages before seeing any animals. We did see lots of wooden cutouts of animals, and I honestly started to think that we somehow misunderstood the signs, and in fact this was just an animal-coded network of jogging trails. But soon enough we saw some kangaroos. It's amazing how effortlessly they hop around.
We took a small detour on the way home to see the Pont du Gard, which according to Wikipedia is part of a Roman aqueduct that carried water 50km from Uzes to Nimes, while only losing 17m of elevation (less than two feet per mile)!
Close to home, we stopped off at our favorite park in Grenoble, where the girls got to play for a little while before piling back into the car one last time. Samantha's favorite thing was walking over a rope bridge and then sliding down a long slide feet-first on her belly.
On the way home, we all had fun sticking our hands out the car windows. It's nice when you get to re-experience that kind of thing with your kids.
